Token Lockup Statement - What Happens Now?
As you might already know, we have recently released our brand new staking feature. That brings around a burning question - where will the token develop further? The next milestone on our list is the decision regarding the token balances that reside on our wallets and should have been unfrozen within the next 5 years, according to our White Paper. For starters, let's make a quick recap of everything: our team has a certain amount of tokens that are placed on cold wallets. In total, those tokens form 56% of the total supply, with only 14% belonging to the team directly - other tokens are dedicated for ChangeNOW’s development (all addresses are listed in the White Paper). On April 29th, 2019, the tokens had been frozen on our team wallets; the initial plan was to unlock 20% of them every year for five consecutive years. However, in light of the recent events, we have discussed it internally and decided to change the plan for releasing those tokens into the market. The main priority for us through recent years has been to improve the quality of our service and create an ecosystem in which the token will be used. The idea of releasing the locked-up tokens into the market in this stage of both the token and the ecosystem development seems somewhat unfair to our customers, who are and always will be our top priority. That’s why we decided to move the beginning of the lockup period to Q4 2020 - so that the first portion of tokens allocated for founding team bonuses will be unlocked in a year. In addition, we are changing the rules of vesting in favor of our clients. Now, the vesting plan will be designed for a 10-year lockup period instead of 5. We understand that a single release of a large number of tokens into the market can lead to negative effects on the ecosystem; that's why we want to make this process as smooth as possible. Thus, we will unlock only 10% instead of 20% in the next unlocking event and all of the following ones. The plan for unlocking other tokens goes as follows: - the team vesting portion will be locked with a 10-year vesting plan - the marketing budget will be locked with a 10-year vesting plan with the exception of a 150,000 NOW annual budget - the part allocated to advisors and evangelists will also be locked with a 10-year vesting plan with the exception of a 150,000 NOW annual budget - the risk prevention and development budget will be used for the internal needs of the system (i.e. staking rewards and swaps; at the moment, only staking rewards will enter the market). - the private sale budget will stay locked up until it has been sold out to private investors who are validated by our team. By default, at the moment of purchase, we will impose a lockup rule for a certain period (from 6 months to a year) from the date when the transaction is announced. - If the risk prevention and the development budgets are not spent within 10 years, a reconsideration will be made; by default, the tokens will be spent on ecosystem development. All of those changes will be reflected in our White Paper as soon as possible. Thank you for staying with ChangeNOW! A friendly reminder: if you haven’t staked NOW Tokens yet, you can do it here - the time is NOW!
